ALL THE FALLING BABIES By Eric Gansworth (Onondaga)

If you’ve been raised in an Indian community, or at least in my Indian community, you know we only say “Native American” in mock seriousness, or in serious seriousness, for the benefit of one of those rare Indians who can’t take a joke. If you’re one of those rare Indians who can’t take a joke, you’re likely to receive some Side-Eyes from the Rest of Us. We suspect you’re likely not from a community, even if we don’t ask explicitly what community claims you. Though most Indians would not ask this, directly, it often lingers like stale cigarette smoke in a bingo hall.

But today, you might get asked this question. Your friend has lured you to this place with promises that you could smoke cigs without people and their prying eyes asking, Is he smoking? Should we tell his mom? Your friend says his Auntie is cool, that even though you’re only fourteen, she won’t care if you smoke. But as soon as you’re in the door, you know this encounter with his auntie will make you squirm. The bad side of a community claiming you is that they know all your business. Especially if you’re fourteen. She won’t ask if you’re smoking, but will she ask if a community claims you, or won’t she ask? And will you know what you’re supposed to say?

Your friend’s flint-tongued, black-coffee-drinking, unfiltered-smoking Auntie might ask, because she’s been asked. It’s kind of the Rez Circle of Life. She was born on the Rez but raised in the city and came back to claim her family land on her own. You recognize her as soon as you step in the door and light your cig. You wouldn’t have entered if you’d known who lived here. Enjoy that cig. You’ve crossed the threshold. It better be worth it.

This flint-tongued, black-coffee-drinking, unfiltered-smoking Auntie knows there are multiple ways to answer that question, especially for an Auntie like this. She’s lived some of her childhood and most of her adult life on Dog Street, bisecting the Rez. Somebody could ask a member of her community if they claimed her. But say they ask someone she throat-punched in the second-grade Rez school lunchroom. That person might say, Who? Never heard of her. Just must be a big old fake, smiling, having waited all these years for that sweet revenge.

Lucky for you, that Auntie has been asked this question many times, so she might go easier on you. She didn’t get this way overnight. She wants her community to claim her, but she knows some people had done custom Rez math and decided she wasn’t Indian enough for the cutoff. What was her equation? Were there deductions for the second-grade throat-punch? She couldn’t speak the language, plus she didn’t do beadwork, plus she didn’t even know how to Round Dance or Rabbit Dance.

No language

+ no beadwork

+ no dancing

Never find a man and have kids.

But she knows people lie. She got that flint tongue, biting the edges, so she wouldn’t scream when people talked in front of her like she was invisible, a superpower that she never wanted. She pours you tar-black coffee and silently dares you to ask for milk and Equal to soften its bite. Then she offers you half-and-half and Sweet’N Low, but no Equal and no milk. “Sweet and Low is my Indian name,” she says, laughing, then adds, “If you’re a real Indian, milk is gonna trigger your lactose intolerance, so you might as well enjoy the richness of half-and-half before the pains set in. And no Indians ever get Equal, really, do they?” She does Rez math casually and fast all the time. And that’s how you know she was raised in a community.

At fourteen, you’ve already learned to drink black coffee, so you could decline, but you might offend the Flint-Tongued Auntie if you don’t accept her offer. Decisions, decisions. You know she has nieces and nephews, the real kind, the blood kind, who are not enrolled, so she might be eyeing you up to see if you’ve ever talked smack about them in the Rez school lunchroom with your own tongue you’ve been chipping the soft edges from. You’re probably safe. You talk almost no smack in the lunchroom because you live in a Glass Longhouse. No, not like some future Space Rez, everyone floating in zero gravity, after we’ve been shipped to the Moon, ’cause America has booted us out of our “ancestral territory” again, because it’s run out of arable land again. No, your Glass Longhouse is metaphoric. (Using the word “metaphoric,” even silently in your head, probably clicks you further into that “maybe no community claims you” territory. You smile to yourself because “territory” is a safe word.) You know at fourteen you have no room to smack-talk hardly anyone in the Rez school lunchroom.

You love all the interesting words in English and all the interesting words in Tuscarora, but you’re running out of people to speak the interesting Tuscarora words to. The interesting words might be the only ones people remember, one day. We will loudly whisper to each other in Tuscarora while strolling around white people, so they worry we’re talking about them. We might even forget that it’s a verb-based language. When linguistics professors ask why we have a word for monkeys, we say it’s because we can observe them and derive a name from their behavior. An animal doesn’t have to be Indigenous for us to give it a name. Except, already, at fourteen, you can’t remember if the word for monkey translates to “it hangs from its long tail” or “it throws its own shit at you.” One of these definitions is more useful than the other.

Her name might be Delores or Denise or Deanna or Diana, you didn’t quite catch it when you walked in, and your friend just calls her Auntie D. But you know she’s not a Dorothy, or Doris, or a Dot, like your own Auntie, or maybe she is and she’s made up a younger name to suit her sense of style. You start thinking of her as Flinty D, and you hope your brain is not also like a Glass Longhouse, ’cause if it is, you know she’s going to peek.

“Oh, I know you. You’re the Superhero,” Flinty D says, rapping her knuckles hard on her gleaming Formica table, with the million glints of embedded glitter stabbing your eyes. You realize the name Formica means “a Substitution For Mica” (or “Fake Mica” if you’re being truthful). Is it good or bad that she’s pegged you as the kid everyone called Batman (“Bats” for short)? It started when you were three, loving that TV show maybe too vigorously. You calmed down a few years ago, but your love of Batman is what adults remember about you.

“Folks think you want to be a hero, rescuing everyone,” she adds. “Hah! I think you just want to run around the city with your underpants on the outside to show off the goods.” Her comment reminds you that her tongue should be registered as a deadly weapon. She’s of course right that you are enjoying the discoveries of puberty, all the new ways you’re growing, but nobody wants to be called out for that. So being bold in the beginnings of your man-body, you try to suggest she’s past her prime.

“Only old people call me that, these days,” you say. It is an unwise move. Despite your bold new body, she knows the weaknesses of all the superheroes. It’s her job. She knows she’s lived a divided life and sometimes it’s her job to be a supervillain. Maybe she’s your Catwoman.

“Elders? Is that who you mean?” Flinty D asks, hinting that you’ve forgotten you’re Indian. The word “Elders” hasn’t caught on, but respecting your older community members is an expectation firmly in place. The families who cave to using nursing homes get Side-Eyes for losing their way, as if the rest of us could know their circumstances. “We’re called Elders ’cause we have the wisdom of a lived life, and we’re offering it, so you don’t have to suffer the same pains, the same aches? And today’s your lucky day, Superhero. I have some Wisdom for you.”

You don’t express whether you’d like or dislike her offer, because Flinty D is absolutely going to share her Elder Wisdom. “If you want to keep being the Superhero, you’re probably planning to pack your bags, leave the Rez, and head to the city.” She pauses and smiles, and slides your coffee close, so you can see your reflection in its dark mirror. “You didn’t say how you wanted it, sweetened and lightened?” she asks, pointing with her lips to my cup.

“It’s fine this way,” you say. “Don’t waste your resources.”

“So courteous! You waste money your mom don’t have on them funny books,” she says, sliding your cup closer to you, letting you know that you’d better not waste the cup she’s poured.

“I don’t think twenty-five cents is gonna break her,” you say, quoting the average comic book price. Until recently, you had no after-school job and you didn’t know that every quarter she gave you for comics came from somewhere else. Your family doesn’t have a rainy-day fund. Every time it rains, you dig out coffee cans to catch the ceiling drips and your mom washes her hair in the gathered water, saying rainwater is the purest, ignoring that it has been filtered through the rotting roof of your house. Turning leaks into luxury is your mother’s superpower.

“Kids never think of the value,” Flinty D says. “They all think we’re Plastic Man or Elastic Woman and that we can stretch anything for as long as we need it. That we could take a meal we set for three and make it so unexpected relatives who show up exactly at dinnertime can have a plate. That’s why superheroes are for kids. When you grow up, you know every rubber band breaks if you yank too hard. When you grow up, you’ll know who has that little extra in the serving bowl come dinnertime. Who you might suddenly decide to drop in on. You’ll know who all the Elastic Women are. Maybe you’ll also learn not to stretch them.”

You could say your family shelled out way more for your brother’s lacrosse equipment than they ever would for your comics. You could have long, long runs of both Marvel and DC for the cost of one lacrosse stick or jersey. Your mom says lacrosse is your closest brother’s only chance. (For what? you think.) You wonder what your chances are. You can’t throw or catch or even cradle the ball competently. You can’t participate in your community pastime. You could blame your eyes, which aren’t quite aligned right, but everyone knows you’ve committed the cardinal sin. You don’t care about lacrosse and never did. You could list all the reasons, but they won’t matter. You’ll never be a community star, giving people hope, holding that MVP trophy.

“So why would I have to leave the Rez to be a superhero?” you ask, knowing you’re going to get there at some point, so you cut to the chase. At this moment, you are more like Batman than ever, dangling among the tops of skyscrapers, by the thinnest of ropes.

“You tell me.” She turns your way. “Seem I heard everyone thinks you’re Mister Smarty-Pants. You read all the funny books and you done your calculations. Where do the heroes live?”

You don’t mention that when you and your classmates all got shipped to the white middle school off the Rez, your new teachers didn’t believe any Indians were among the smartest kids in the school. One suggested that maybe you were just smart for an Indian. You are smart enough to know you’re never going to change that teacher’s mind. But as you try to hide that teacher’s voice deep in the Glass Longhouses of your Heart and Mind, you consider Flinty D’s question.

DC heroes live in fake places like Gotham City, Metropolis, Star City, Capitol City, and Central City, and Marvel heroes mostly live in New York City, like you might run into Ben Grimm or Spider-Man on the street if you ever got to Manhattan.

“All the time, superheroes rescue babies falling from tall, tall buildings. Villains know the buildings to go after,” Flinty D says. “All the babies falling from so many tall buildings.”

“We don’t have buildings that tall out here,” you say. The Rez continues to fill with trailers. Even frame houses with more than one story rarely have attics. Your mom says attics are for packrats who have extra stuff they don’t need. “Most of us don’t even have a second story,” you observe, noting the stairway behind Flinty D, hidden behind a curtain. “But you do.”

“Don’t you worry about me, Bats. I got plenty of stories.” She laughs at her own wordplay. She could develop a new word for monkey. “But we’re talking about you. Babies are the most precious accessory for superheroes. Those heroes like their sexy outfits and wrestling other weirdos in other sexy outfits, but at some point, to be true heroes, they gotta arrive just in time for those babies. So many, many falling babies you’d think they were apples past harvest. But look careful at your funny books. All the falling babies are white. They’re not like fruit. When an apple falls, it’s left for bees and deer to eat. Damaged goods. No one wants a bruised apple.” At some point, Flinty D’s been called an Apple, and she’s prepping you for the same fate.

Would you concede that cities were complicated, had greater needs? Wasn’t the need great enough on a Rez to keep a superhero busy? Rez babies deserved to be caught. Even if the fall was from a one-story window, where they get a bruise or two, the way you yourself toppled out your own home’s window before you’d learned how to break your fall.

“When the villain came for our babies and snatched them, to brainwash them into becoming someone else, to forget their origins, no hero showed up to rescue them,” she says, offering you a cig from her unfiltereds pack on the Formica table, but you pass, knowing she’ll keep track and one day come back to collect all you owe. “And the villain? Why, the villain turned out to be the United States, itself. And they were so clever, they called the brainwashing instrument a school, so parents thought it was a good thing.”

You know she’s speaking the truth. When three of your four grandparents were taken to the Indian boarding schools as little kids, that theft was indeed perpetrated by agents of the United States, “for their own good.” No superhero snatched them from the departing train, to deliver them back into the arms of weeping parents, and no American hero ever would. You realize Superman’s colors are close to the flag’s. Wonder Woman and Captain America literally wear versions of the flag as their costumes—truth in advertising on their exposed underpants showing off the abundant goods.

“I’m smart enough to know there’s no such thing as superheroes,” you say. “I just like to draw them and read about them.”

“I didn’t say there’s no such thing. You don’t know, we have our own heroes. You could draw them and their stories,” Flinty D says, and then pauses. Somehow she also knows you draw. “But I bet you don’t know who Flint and Sapling are, the Bad Mind and the Good. I bet your grandparents got shipped away before they heard about those heroes who shaped our world.”

You don’t have any idea who she’s talking about, but you’re too afraid to admit that her sharp tongue is the only Flint you’ve encountered.

“Without knowing they had Indian heroes to rescue them, your grandparents had to discover their own powers as they tumbled toward home. They learned how to make it back to the Rez on their own. Sometimes you don’t need to be super. Sometimes being a plain old hero is good enough to do the job.”

“And how do you know all this?” you ask, trying to peer inside the Glass Longhouses of Flinty D’s Heart and Mind, to see if you can catch a glimpse of these heroes she mentions. “How do you know what it takes to become a hero?”

“Don’t bother trying your x-ray vision,” she laughs. “My kryptonite is well-hidden.” But you already know her kryptonite. It is that eternal Indian question: What community claims you? You wonder if she regrets the secret origin of unwisely landing a throat-punch on the wrong kid in the Rez school lunchroom. If she could travel through time, would she take back the punch or did it feel too good to take back? “I know all this ’cause I was just like you,” Flinty D says, “thinking I could dress in my sexy duds and save the day.”

“So what happened?” you ask. You can’t see into the Glass Longhouses of her Heart and of Mind, but you know her parents took her away “for her own good,” believing the Boarding School idea, rising from dormancy, like all the strongest supervillain plans. You know she came back on her own, because she’s telling you right now. You know community members sometimes still blame her for her history just the same. You know she hates the power of invisibility, understanding that superpowers are sometimes a curse, instead of a gift.

“I’d like to say that the white world wants only white heroes,” she says, draining her cup of tar-black coffee as if she’d doctored it up. “That heroes wear masks so no one can tell who’s under that wild and secret face. It would be a good story, if I got rejected by people in need.”

“You’d like to say that, but you can’t?” you ask. Does a hero only exist if there are people to save, villains to conquer, babies to catch? “Is that why you came back to the Rez and gave up on being a hero? Too much rejection?”

“You think being enrolled is so easy, Bats, ’cause you got your red card, and your enrollment number on Nation Stationery, but you’re close enough to growing up that you’re soon gonna know what it really means to draw that line, to know where you fall.” Flinty D looks at the carbon flakes in her pie-tin ashtray like she’s glancing at your future. “But at some point, someone you love is not gonna be enrolled, and you’re gonna have to decide if it’s still so cut-and-dry to claim and be claimed. And just to be clear, I said you would probably head to the city, showing off your new superhero muscles, seeking out people to rescue,” she reminds you. “Someone’s gonna ask you and demand an answer. It’s hard. But me? I didn’t give up.”

“Well, what happened to you, then?”

“I learned the same hard lessons your grandparents did. What do you think I’m doing right now?” And as she says it, you feel heat rise on your face, the scorch of embarrassment. “I’m saving the falling babies, rescuing them even as we speak, with the powers I have. Like any other superhero, I have claimed my place.” You discover at that moment you’re on the top floor of your own burning building of pride and you’re going to topple any moment. The friend you walked in here with is nowhere to be found. It is only you and the roof and the flames.

“Bats, can’t you feel my arms reaching out, getting ready to wrap around you?” she says, showing her open palms.

And all at once, you do, and you reach across the table, grasp that outstretched hand. You know what community claims you, suddenly understanding that you have just been rescued.